


Outside Your Door

by Unoriginality



Series: Back To Where We Lasted [24]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky likes pretty ladies, F/M, Somewhat canon divergent, everyone should know how to cook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 07:58:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3242162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unoriginality/pseuds/Unoriginality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While she studied the recipe, he pulled out what they needed, leaving the milk and cream in the fridge for the moment. "Everything look okay?" he asked.</p>
<p>Maria looked up at him. "It sounds good," she said. "You have good taste, Mister Cooks A Feast In  Less Than Four Hours."</p>
<p>He grinned. "I like cooking. Here, we'll start with the spinach. Have you chopped fresh vegetables before?"</p>
<p>She shook her head. "No, but I'm told I'm good with a knife."</p>
<p>"You're a terrifying woman, Maria," he said. "I approve."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outside Your Door

**Author's Note:**

> To the AoS fans: I am so sorry, but I am not taking any character development she has in the series into account, because I've never seen the show. There is a long sob story involved, which I won't bore anyone with, but it just means I have to mark this as canon divergent and ignore the series. Sorry!

Morton Williams had an uncomfortably large number of people, many off early coming in to get their food before the post-rush group showed up, making it twice a mess than it already was.

Bucky hated crowds. Too many people pressed too closely together like a bunch of sardines in a can, and impossible to tell who might be armed and who wasn't, who might possibly be a Hydra agent, and who was just an overworked mother with her brood of too many children, all of whom were always crying or pawing at the candy.

He didn't remember being that rowdy as a child. His mother would probably tell him his memory was full of shit.

Fortunately, Bucky hadn't needed much that afternoon; it wasn't grocery day, it was 'fix a meal for yourself because I'm going out with Sharon' day. Which meant Bucky was indulging in Italian food, which also meant he had to get some ingredients. He only needed three things for the meal he'd picked out, and it'd have enough left over to get him through the next time Steve and Sharon went out, so probably three days from then.

Shiny new relationship syndrome.

He was holding his basket up out of reach of the running children circling the checkout lane like a bunch of vultures, waiting his turn in line when he heard his name. Not James Barnes, but Bucky, which meant it was either someone he knew, or someone he didn't that had a death wish. He looked around, finally spotting Maria Hill the next lane over. He smiled, then waved her over to the empty space in line behind him.

She obliged him, her small handbasket clinking with cans and a few boxes of what looked like microwave food from where he stood. "You don't look like you're buying enough for two super soldiers," she said. "Where's Steve?"

"Out with Sharon," Bucky said, then held up his own basket. "This'll get me two meals with just me."

She peered into his basket. "I see tortellini, some tomatoes in a can, and some green leafy stuff."

"That 'green leafy stuff' is spinach," he said. "I have the other stuff I need at home. Why, what's for your gourmet meal of the evening?"

"Not spinach," she said, looking as placid as ever. He wondered where her smile from the ball had gone. "I can't cook, so I live on Amy's. Lucky for me, she makes organic." She motioned towards him with her basket. She wasn't kidding, lots of Amy's Organic line, soups, frozen meals, a few microwavable pizzas. At least they were organic instead of Banquet or something, but yikes.

"You don't know how to cook?" he said. "I thought that was taught as an essential life skill in high school."

Maria gave him a dismissive shrug. "The class was optional, and it was taught in the same class as parenting at my school and that wasn't something I wanted to do. I didn't care to have to take care of a baby doll that would cry in the middle of class and the night and my grade would get docked if you'd had my parents babysit while I was in school unless I paid them money I didn't have because I was fifteen. I decided to forgo the lesson."

An idea occurred to him, and he was spitting it out before he had a chance to check himself that it'd be a good one. "Why don't you come over for dinner tonight? You'll get some real food, and I can start teaching you to cook. Maybe you can start living on something better than canned soup."

She raised her eyebrows. "Is that a date offer?"

"Why not?" he asked with a smile that used to get him a 'yes' to pretty much anything when he'd give it to a pretty girl. "Steve and Sharon aren't the only ones around here who should get a date or two. And even if it weren't, I like you, I'd rather see you able to at least have more variety in your diet than that. Food gets boring pretty fast if you eat the same stuff over and over again."

Maria looked at him like she was considering his offer, then looked at her basket. "I still have to get this to last me until you've managed to beat the art of cooking into my brain, but you got a deal." She paused, then gave him a subtle smile, but it was there. "And a date."

"You won't regret it," he said, putting his basket on the belt as the mother with the hyper children finally paid, took her bags, and left, one of the kids trailing behind by what couldn't be a safe distance. "I'm a good teacher."

He waited after his transaction was over for her to get her own food paid for, and offered to carry her bag for her.

"Thank you, but I've got it," she said. "I'd rather we both have a hand free if we find trouble, and now that I'm with you, we're bound to."

He frowned. "I'd be insulted if that weren't true."

"You're an Avenger, Bucky. We now have two Avengers together, there will be trouble," she said, sounding annoyingly logical about it.

"Are you trying to jinx us?" he asked.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "What, it hasn't been boring for you lately? It's just now March, and it's been quiet since Syria."

"For you, maybe," Bucky said. "Steve and I had a job in Venezuela last month that made him miss Valentine's Day. He was less than impressed."

"His first Valentine's Day with someone to spend it with and he spent it out of country." She shook her head, and once again, Bucky wasn't sure if she was being serious or just very deadpan. "I'm sure Sharon understood."

"Sharon decided to whack us both with a slipper for it, actually," Bucky said. "She said we get that treatment with every job we get. If I didn't like the money, I'd be inclined to find a new job that she could tail us in, just to avoid that slipper of hers. That rubber sole has a snap to it."

She made a noise of acknowledgement. "Rubber soles tend to, yes."

Bucky once again wondered where the Maria he'd danced with had gone, and it idly occurred to him that she was playing along with the atmosphere of the ball. She'd be a tough nut to crack, but that smile he remembered was worth the effort.

Once at the Tower, he held the door for her, something that seemed to catch her off-guard, but she thanked him. When she asked him about the job he and Steve had been on in February, he made a point of looking around the crowded lobby. She took the hint and let it drop. The elevator was crowded, so talking wasn't really done, not with the one-sided phone conversations going on around them to drown them out.

The elevator cleared out a little at a time, and finally, they got to their floor. "I need to put these away," Maria said, lifting her grocery bag slightly. "How dressed up do I have to get for our first date?"

First date. He liked the sound of that phrase. "I would say not at all, honestly," he said. "Not if we're going to be teaching you to cook."

"Good point," she said. "I'll be back quickly, then."

They parted ways, Bucky stopping at his apartment and Maria moving on to hers down the hall. Once his coat was hung in the closet and his groceries put away, Bucky did a quick sweep of the apartment to make sure it was clean. It'd be a bad impression for a first date if it weren't.

Other than one of Steve's many sketchbooks and a packet of pencils left on the dining room table, and Bucky's tablet, which immediately was set down on the kitchen island for access to the recipe, the place was clear. He put away Steve's art supplies, and brought his tablet back out of sleep and went to the bookmarked recipe.

"Miss Hill is here, Mister Barnes," JARVIS said.

"Thanks, JARIVS," he said, walking to the door. The door lock clicked, and Bucky opened the door for Maria. "I'd say welcome to the humble abode, but it's only humble by Tony Stark standards."

Maria raised an eyebrow, looking faintly amused, stepping in and looking around. "It also doesn't look terribly different from mine. I think my kitchen's smaller, though." She glanced towards the hallway. "And mine's only a one bedroom."

He looked in the same direction she was, before shutting the door behind her. "The bedrooms aren't really of interest right now. Right now, our concern is the kitchen. Come on, you get your first lesson in Proper Cooking 101." If she had any reaction to his accidental slip about the bedroom, she didn't show it beyond another glance down the hallway.

She followed him into the kitchen, her boots making a similar thunk on the tiled floor as his. He was used to hearing Steve's stocking feet, or even his regular shoes. Boots and shoes sounded different to him. "Time to learn how to successfully adult, hm?"

"At least in one area," he said. "I haven't figured it out in some areas, so you're on your own there." He showed her the recipe on his tablet. "This is what we're making."

"Spinach Tomato Tortellini? That sounds richer than my blood."

"It's not as rich as it sounds," Bucky said with a smile. "It's Italian. It just happens to be a step above pizza and spaghetti with meatballs." He adjusted the serving size from two to three. It meant his food would last one more meal instead of two, but he found it worth it. "I'll get out the ingredients. Hopefully none of that is anything you're allergic to."

While she studied the recipe, he pulled out what they needed, leaving the milk and cream in the fridge for the moment. "Everything look okay?" he asked.

Maria looked up at him. "It sounds good," she said. "You have good taste, Mister Cooks A Feast In Less Than Four Hours."

He grinned. "I like cooking. Here, we'll start with the spinach. Have you chopped fresh vegetables before?"

She shook her head. "No, but I'm told I'm good with a knife."

"You're a terrifying woman, Maria," he said. "I approve."

Over the next half hour or so, he walked her through the recipe, at one point having to take her hands and reteach them how to chop spinach in a way that didn't make him worry for his well-being.

"There's garlic in the tomatoes and we're adding garlic on top of it," she noted at one point. "That's a lot of garlic."

"Not as much as there could be," he said. "Italian food loves garlic. It's good for you."

"Not so great for fresh breath," she pointed out.

He grinned. "I'd offer to let you just use my toothbrush after dinner if it bothers you, but we might be a bit early for sharing a toothbrush."

"Aren't you charming," she said, that subtle smile there, making him think she didn't actually mean that the way she'd said it. "Did that line work on women back in your time?"

"You mean it doesn't now?"

She looked like she was giving that consideration. "That depends entirely on you. Now come on, let's finish cooking. The smell's making me hungry."

Bucky let Maria be the first one to sample her cooking, stirring his tortellini in the sauce a bit to let it cool. She hardly pulled a When Harry Met Sally, which was just as well, as Bucky thought that might make him laugh too hard to enjoy the show, but she seemed immensely pleased. "This is good," she said. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me," he said. "You're the one that cooked it. I just supervised." He finally took a bite, mentally grading her cooking. "And you did a damn good job on it."

There was another one of those small smiles. He'd have to work harder to get a brighter one. "I had a good supervisor," she said. "I can't promise this quality in the future."

"Relax," he said. "I'm not going to let you screw up the food. And even if I did, you still wouldn't be poisoning me or anything. My stomach's strong enough to handle a few botched meals while my cook is learning how to work in a kitchen."

She poked at her food. "So tell me, Master Chef, how many times did you screw up before you figured things out?"

Bucky didn't answer at first, chewing his food and trying to think back that far. "Probably more than my family would've liked. Mom had Paul and I both take turns cooking dinner as we hit our teen years to practice for when we lived on our own. She was pretty firm that barring something life threatening, we weren't allowed to move back home and feed off her cooking, so we had to learn to cook ourselves. Which meant Rebecca and Peter got to try first hand the disaster that awaited them when they hit their teen years. Fortunately, I got out of there before that."

"How old were they when you moved out?" Maria asked.

"Peter was six, Rebecca was ten." His mind drifted back a bit, his food almost forgotten, then he shook his head. "That was a long time ago."

"A very long time ago," Maria said, not sounding cruel in her agreement, simply making a statement of fact. "According to your records, you turn ninety-nine in seven days."

He looked back at the calendar. "Good lord, you're right, my birthday's in a week. How'd that happen?"

"Sixty-four days have passed since the new year began," she said. "Or did you mean that figuratively?"

Bucky eyed her critically. "I can't tell if you're being a smartass or not."

Her expression didn't change. "What do you think?" she said, although that time, he detected the humor in her tone.

"I think you're too good at subtlety for my own good here."

Something in her eyes changed, though her face betrayed none of what he saw. There was something lonely there, something that he wasn't fully prepared to see. "It keeps me alive," she said. "I've never been terribly emotional."

"Not being emotional doesn't mean not having emotions," Bucky pointed out. "You're not exactly Lieutenant Commander Data here."

She sat back, one corner of her lips quirked up. "I see someone finally saw Star Trek."

"I've been catching up," he said, giving her a bright smile, hoping his good mood would be infectious and he'd get a real, full smile out of her. "Slowly, anyway. Still haven't seen _It's A Wonderful Life_. Care to queue that up after we're done eating and cleaning up?"

That lonely look abated, and she smiled, small, but warm. "I suppose a dinner date is best finished off with a movie," she agreed. "And it's a good movie. I'm surprised it took you this long to get to it."

He leaned in towards her, lowering his voice to a few decibels louder than a conspiratorial whisper. "The truth? I've been kinda hoping to watch it with you so I could answer your question about the dance contests."

She leaned in, lowering her voice to the same level. "It certainly took you long enough to ask me over."

He sat back. "Yeah, we got a bit busy in February, and Steve's been dragging Sharon over a lot, so I haven't really had a chance to track you down. You're gone a lot, and Pepper doesn't always tell me where to. Just that you're busy with the company."

"That's fair, I suppose," she said. "I do a lot of odd jobs for the company. I'm not always home." She deflected the conversation back onto him. "You mentioned that you'd been on a job in February. We noticed your absence, you were gone quite some time."

"Job in Venezuela," Bucky said, letting her get away with it for the moment. "We were hired to protect some people smuggling medical supplies in. The government there hasn't allotted enough of their budget into imports, so the hospitals and medical offices are suffering shortages of what they need. People aren't getting proper health care. So we were technically on the wrong side of the law, but it was for a good cause."

"I'm not one to judge," she said. "I was deputy director of SHIELD, I haven't always played friendly with the law."

"I don't think any of us have," Bucky said. "So don't feel like you have anything to make up for."

Maria didn't say anything in response at first, studying him with an odd look, like she was debating if what she was about to say would be too honest or not. She must've settled on honesty, as she finally said "I sometimes think we owed it to Steve to find out about you before he had to fight you and find out the hard way."

Bucky gave her a reassuring smile. "The only reason anyone found out in the first place is because of Steve. And he didn't even recognize me until he accidentally pulled my face mask off. So don't think you owed that to anyone. I was a better kept secret than Zola was. You had absolutely no way of finding out before I was sent after Steve and Natasha."

"I know," she said. "That doesn't change that I wish everything had gone differently in that scenario."

"So do I," he said. "There's a lot of things I wish had gone differently. But you know what? I wouldn't be sitting here in an apartment I share with Steve, a member of a good, if weird, family called the Avengers, enjoying a first date with a pretty lady like you. So sometimes it's all right, despite how we got there."

She tilted her head slightly. "That's rather philosophical of you."

He shrugged. "I've had a lot of time to think about things," he said. "Sometimes, I don't have anything else to do. I'm not always very good at remembering it's all right, but you think it often enough, and it starts to sink in." He paused. "Slowly."

His addendum seemed to amuse her somewhat. "How long have you been trying to sink that one in?"

"Too long," he admitted. "And will be for a long time to come, I suspect. I got almost a century of 'how we got there' to get through."

Her amusement faded back into that place between honesty and discretion, and he let her mull over whatever was going through her head, waited patiently for her to decide where to take the conversation. She looked down at her empty bowl. "I never saw the file," she said. "I only know what Tony said in his press release. It's still enough to make me wonder how you can trust yourself around Steve, much less any of the rest of us. I don't think I would in your position."

Wasn't exactly the direction he was expecting, but it wasn't terribly surprising, either. She was a guarded woman, spent years as Fury's deputy director of an espionage organization that was ultimately run by a corrupt international terrorist group. Anyone who had that job and didn't come out wearing heavy armor was nuttier than his grandmother's awful fruitcakes she'd make at Christmas that he was forced to eat.

But, he wanted to earn her trust. He wanted- if nothing else -to be her friend, her genuine, actual friend. If that evening was their one and only date, that was fine. But he wanted a friend, and something told him that she needed one herself. Maybe he was wrong; it'd been a long time since he'd done real people reading, but that flash of loneliness he thought he saw made him think that she didn't let herself have friends much. Between the muted way she expressed her emotions and the secrets and danger she'd lived with daily for years now, she probably didn't have many.

He'd take the chance that he was wrong, rather than risk being right and closing a door on her.

So he got up and took her bowl. "Honestly? I don't. Not all the time," he said. "Come on, Miss Cook. Here's the bad part of cooking. The cleaning up part." He smiled. "We can talk more once the dishwasher's running. Promise."

She seemed to accept that for the moment, getting up and helping him clean up the kitchen. She rinsed the dishes and handed them to him to load into the dishwasher. There weren't many dishes, just enough for two people, so it didn't take them long. He let her decide where they'd sit- the table or the couch. She chose the table.

"So." Maria said once she was settled, folding her hands on the table in front of her. "I believe you were answering my question."

Bucky sat back, crossing his arms, his metal finger tapping on his right arm. "I was, wasn't I? I gave you the short answer, but I guess if I want you to trust me at all, I should probably give more than that, hm?"

"It might help," she agreed.

He considered how to answer. "Hydra's Winter Soldier only exists when I'm sleeping. Unless I start murdering people in my sleep, you don't have to worry about him. But I won't deny that I have some-" he took a breath, "-idiosyncrasies, to put it nicely. And I probably always will. I'm slow to adapt to new routines, for example. I had specific programming, I followed it, that was my routine. It never varied. I still can't think of those dishes in the cupboards as ours, and we've been here three months."

She glanced past him to the cupboards, then looked back at him. "How'd you adapt to working with Steve on missions so quickly?"

He smiled. "For one, working with him predated Hydra. It was an older programming I could fall back on. For another, I'm used to working with people on mission. You think they just let their favorite wild card run out with a gun and nobody at least near enough for extraction? They didn't trust me. I was a weapon, and weapons can explode in your hand if you don't handle them just so. All it'd take is one wrong memory, one wrong moment, and they'd have to deal with a super soldier and master assassin running free and causing all sorts of hell for them. If they hadn't been having to deal with what you guys did with SHIELD's files and the helicarriers, I might've been in bigger trouble for refusing to follow through with my kill imperative and saving Steve instead. And you know Steve would've been ripping them apart one at a time to get me back and keep me safe."

A tiny smile formed on her face. "He would've been, yes, and he would've enlisted all of us to help him."

"Would you have?"

"Yes," she said without any hesitation. "Steve is a good friend, and inspires loyalty in people. There's a very good reason Director Fury entrusted the mission against Hydra to him."

He went quiet at the mention of Nick Fury, watching her for signs of any anger at him from her. "I know you said when we first met that you blamed Hydra for his death, but be honest with me. Do you blame me at all?"

"No more than I ever blamed Barton for nearly killing us all when he attacked the helicarrier we were on to rescue Loki," she said, again without a trace of hesitation. "A person can't control their actions when under brainwashing, it would be foolish of me to hold those actions against them as if they'd had a choice. The methods used may have been different, I would imagine more traumatic for you than it was for him, but that doesn't change the fact that you had no personal agency at the time. The director knew long before Hydra sent you after him that something wasn't right in the system. We just didn't know what. He accepted that there would be consequences for investigating them, possibly fatal ones. It's a job hazard we've all accepted in the business. It was Hydra that killed him for putting his nose where they didn't want him, not you. You were their weapon, nothing more."

He let out a relieved breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Glad to hear that," he said. "I know he meant a lot to the Avengers. I regret all of my targets, but he's one of the big ones."

There was another genuine smile from her. "I can't speak for him, but I suspect he would forgive you. If you'd known anything beyond Hydra, you wouldn't have done it. He sometimes came across as hard, and he could be. But most of that is the business. He was a good man underneath that."

At first, Bucky didn't reply, just looked at her as if he were somehow expecting more to be said, maybe another shoe to be dropped, but nothing else was forthcoming, so he lowered his gaze to the table. "Killed a lot of good men like him." He looked up at her without moving his head. "I know you're vetting me before deciding if you should trust me to be a friend." He looked back over his shoulder to the kitchen. "Or if you should trust me around you with kitchen cutlery." He turned back around. "So I'm kinda wondering. How'm I doing so far?"

His blunt honesty seemed to catch her off guard, probably vastly different from her world of spies and secrets and lies. He had a feeling Steve did that to her sometimes, too. But her reaction turned into one of those smiles that he was fishing for. "You're doing very well," she said. "I have a better idea than the movie. There's a lot we don't know about each other; I probably know more about you than you know of me, I'm familiar with your pre-Hydra record, and I'm not going to ask you to talk about what happened with Hydra, but perhaps equalizing that playing field a bit would be a good place to start." She paused. "We can save the movie for a double date night with Sharon and Steve."

"So I've earned a second date?" he asked with a wide grin.

"Only if you don't get smug about it," she said.

"How about happy? Can I be happy?"

She raised an eyebrow. "I would hope you'd be happy about it. I'd be insulted if you weren't."

"Then let your ego be assured, I'm happy that I get a second date." He folded his hands behind his head. "So hit me. You can lead off with the questions. Ladies first, after all."

They spent the next few hours talking, losing track of time. He was a Brooklyn boy, born and raised. Never really understood religion, which surprised her. When asked if it bothered her, she shook her head. He'd gone to MIT. Didn't graduate top of his class like Tony had, but he did well. Got a degree in chemical engineering, went to work for Stark Industries as a weapons designer. He was drafted; he told everyone he had enlisted, but that was a lie that had gotten out of control years ago, when he told Steve he'd enlisted so Steve wouldn't be disappointed in him for not volunteering in the first place. Maria was the first person that he'd told. He was sure that Steve had seen the records and knew better- most people had, certainly -but he'd never 'fessed up to it.

She was from Chicago. Her father had been CIA, her mother had been a teacher. She was the middle child of three girls. She wanted to follow in her father's footsteps as a government agent since she was eight, and started taking courses in martial arts, boxing, firearms. She graduated top of her class in high school, went to Bradley University and got her bachelor's in Criminal Justice. She applied to SHIELD as soon as she had her degree in hand.

"What's it like being the oldest?" she asked.

"A pain in the ass," Bucky replied. "Especially with Steve as part of the family. That boy could find trouble in a church if he wanted. Paul was a hellion, Rebecca was the family darling. Mom nearly had fluffy kittens of glee when Rebecca was born. She had a girl to offset some of the excess testosterone in the household. Then Peter came along and there went any hope of balance." He smiled. "What about you? Being the middle kid can't be easy."

"It wasn't," she said. "The oldest had all the expectations dumped on her, and my little sister got away with murder. The middle child tends to get forgotten. Not to be spoiled, not to aim high. Did my damndest to get noticed by my parents. I think getting into SHIELD made my dad burst with pride, though. I was the only one that went into government work like him. Genevieve got her Missus degree at Northwestern. Lizzy went into accounting. I'm not sure if she did that because she likes numbers, or if it was a stable career. She never did know what she wanted to do in high school."

"Do you still have contact with them?" Bucky asked.

"Minimal," Maria said. "The less attention I draw to them, the less likely they are to be used against me. What about you? I heard that your youngest brother is still alive."

Bucky frowned. "I'm not sure how much Hydra is willing to mess with him. They know how hard I'd come down on them if they so much as touched him. And he's former Navy, I don't know how much the military would get involved, but I can't imagine that the Navy would take that one sitting down." He tapped one metal finger on the table. "I hadn't been smart enough to think about what might happen to him. He threw himself into the spotlight when the news about me broke, so I guess there wouldn't have been much help for it."

"How old is he now?"

Bucky had to stop at that question. The math was easy, that wasn't the problem. He looked down at the table. "Eighty-seven this year," he said. "Doesn't seem possible. Last time I saw him, he was twelve. Missed a lot."

Maria's hand appeared in his field of vision, resting lightly on his metal hand. "That isn't your fault," she said. "You have time now."

He flicked his gaze to her, offering her a weak smile. "Not enough. But I still have family with the Avengers, at least. And you guys aren't going anywhere for awhile."

She withdrew her hand, folding it with her other to rest her chin on it again. "God willing," she said. "We like to find trouble."

"And you've got the two greatest soldiers in history to help keep you all alive. Plus, if it comes to it, we have Bruce."

That got her to laugh, just a little. "He's very good at making things we don't want alive dead," she agreed. "If we could just cut down on his collateral damage, that'd be wonderful. Of course, I'm not SHIELD anymore, I don't have to deal with fallout of that now."

"Excuse me," JARVIS cut in. "Captain Rogers is home. If this conversation is private, you may wish to save the rest for another time."

Both Maria and Bucky looked over at the digital wall clock. "How'd it hit eleven?" Bucky asked.

Maria's eyebrows raised. "It happened when we weren't looking."

They turned from the clock to the front entryway when they heard the door unlock and open. "I'm home, Bucky," Steve called in. The coat closet opened, then shut, and Steve appeared around the corner into view and paused. "Oh. Hi, Maria. I didn't expect to see you here."

She smiled one of her subdued smiles, but Bucky could see that it was as warm as some of the ones he'd earned that night. "Bucky invited me over for a dinner date. You might want to get used to me, he's promised to teach me to cook."

Steve gave Bucky a curious look, then focused back on Maria. "I don't mind having you around. It'd be nice to get to see you more often."

"We're having a double date with you and Sharon," Bucky added. "We have to watch _It's A Wonderful Life_. Has Jimmy Stewart in it." He motioned to Maria. "She says it's his best performance."

"That'll take a lot of talent," Steve said, walking over to the table. "He was pretty good in _The Philadelphia Story_."

"So Bucky told me," Maria said. She glanced at the time again. "I do need to go, though. It's gotten late." She smiled at Bucky. "When shall I come over again?"

"Whenever and as often as you want," Bucky said, returning that smile with a grin that threatened to crack his face.

"Tomorrow, then?"

"Sounds good to me. I'll walk you to the door." He got up when she did.

"You don't have to," she said, heading for the door.

"I'm old-fashioned, indulge me," he said, walking with her.

She gave him one more smile. "Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow."

Once she had left, Bucky turned back to go to the table to see Steve watching him like the whole exchange had been the most bizarre thing he'd seen in his life. "What?"

Steve shook his head. "I gotta say, that's one woman I didn't think you'd ask out. She can be hard to befriend."

"I know," Bucky said, sitting back down once he was at the table. Steve took the seat that Maria had occupied. "But she's a pretty lady. And she's a good dancer. Saw her in Morton Williams; the poor woman lives on canned soups and microwave dinners. I decided that needed to be fixed."

Steve glanced back towards the door for a moment before looking back at Bucky. "Well, at least you finally got a date."

"Can it, Rogers."


End file.
